General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Dark Tourist

Dark Tourist is a 2018 Netflix documentary travel series in which New Zealand journalist David Farrier visits sites associated with death, disaster, and atrocity around the world and meets the tourists, guides, and residents drawn to them. The eight-episode season was released in full on July 20, 2018, with episodes of roughly 40 minutes each organized by region.¹^•² It was New Zealand's first Netflix original series.³

Key fact	Detail
Format	One season of 8 episodes, about 40 minutes each, released July 20, 2018 on Netflix²^•¹
Host	David Farrier, a New Zealand journalist who co-directed the 2016 documentary Tickled⁴
Production	Executive produced by Carthew Neal, David Farrier, and Mark McNeill through Razor Films and Fumes TV⁵
Rating	TV-MA; 70% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (20 reviews) and 66 on Metacritic (5 critics)¹^•⁶
Scope	Farrier visits 28 dark tourism sites across the season, according to one academic analysis⁷
Renewal	Netflix did not order a second season; Farrier pointed to the Covid-19 pandemic in a 2021 blog post⁸

Spoilers

Premise and host

Each episode follows Farrier to a different region to examine what the show calls dark tourism, travel to places historically associated with death and tragedy. Over the series, Farrier joins a cult in Mexico that worships death, tours the radioactive area near Fukushima alongside other visitors, encounters vampires in New Orleans, and heads to the planet's most heavily nuclear-bombed location to swim and fish in its waters.¹ In an interview at release, Farrier described the intent as going "to these places where something horrific might have happened, poke some of the ethical issues, and then focus on the humanity around the sidelines."⁸

Farrier came to the series after the success of Tickled, his 2016 documentary about competitive endurance tickling, which secured him the opportunity to develop a travel series for Netflix.⁹ Reviewers frequently compared his style to that of the British documentary maker Louis Theroux; one retrospective called the show "Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends for the modern day."⁸

Episodes

The season's eight episodes, as listed by Netflix:²

Latin America (40 min): Farrier meets Pablo Escobar's enforcer in Colombia, witnesses an exorcism in Mexico, and participates in a faux illegal border crossing.
Japan (41 min): David goes to a community affected by intense radiation, walks through a forest believed to be haunted, and tours a deserted island alongside people who once lived there.
United States (41 min): He meets a Jeffrey Dahmer enthusiast in Milwaukee, takes two tours dedicated to the JFK assassination in Dallas, and dines with vampires in New Orleans.
The Stans (42 min): In Kazakhstan he and a fellow dark tourist swim in a lake formed by a nuclear blast; his trip to Turkmenistan does not go as planned.
Europe (40 min): After participating in a World War II reenactment, he visits a disturbing museum and travels to Cyprus in hopes of seeing a forbidden city.
South East Asia (39 min): In Cambodia he is offered the chance to shoot a cow, tours Myanmar, and witnesses the cleaning of a mummified corpse in Indonesia.
Africa (40 min): He attends a voodoo festival in Benin, visits an infamous area of Johannesburg, and speaks with white South African separatists.
Back in the USA (42 min): Charles Manson's pen pal gets confrontational in an interview; Farrier also prepares for the end of the world and visits an extreme haunted house.

Reception

Critical response was mixed. On Rotten Tomatoes the season holds a 70% Tomatometer from 20 reviews, with a critics consensus that Farrier's "empathetic curiosity keeps Dark Tourist from feeling too exploitative," though its observations of macabre destinations "often leave something to be desired"; the audience Popcornmeter stands at 69%.¹ Metacritic assigned a Metascore of 66 based on 5 critic reviews, with a user score of 6.0 from 22 ratings.⁶

Some critics were harsh. A Guardian review placed the series in a trend of "making titillating TV from the world's troublespots," calling it shallow and sordid.¹⁰ The Washington Post put it at the top of a summer do-not-watch list and questioned the ethics of an irreverent look at serial killing.⁴ Other reviewers praised Farrier's willingness to enter risky situations while letting his subjects speak for themselves.⁸

Netflix did not renew the series. Farrier wrote in a 2021 blog post that the Covid-19 pandemic ended prospects for a second season, though he later said he would be open to developing more installments.⁸^•⁹

The phenomenon it depicts

Dark tourism is a loose label for tourism involving visits to places that owe their notoriety to death, disaster, atrocity, or what is sometimes called difficult heritage. The term entered the scholarly lexicon in 1996, when two academics in Glasgow applied it to sites associated with the assassination of JFK, though the practice is far older; the Roman Colosseum has been described as one of the first dark tourist sites, and until the late 18th century Londoners paid to watch mass executions from grandstands near present-day Marble Arch.¹¹

The field has grown as an academic subject. Dr Philip Stone, who runs the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire, studies how people face their own mortality by looking at deaths of significance.¹¹ A 2017 review by Duncan Light, Senior Lecturer in Tourism at Bournemouth University, evaluated six themes in two decades of research, including definition and scope, ethics, political and ideological dimensions, demand, management, and research methods, and argued that the research had not convincingly demonstrated that dark tourism and thanatourism (tourism motivated by encounters with death) are distinct from heritage tourism.¹² Scholars Michael S. Bowman and Phaedra C. Pezzullo have questioned the trope of "dark" itself, interrogating the assumptions behind labeling destinations at sites of death as dark.¹³

Prominent destinations include Auschwitz-Birkenau, which became a memorial in 1947 and a museum in 1955 and drew a record two million visitors in 2016; the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, opened in 2014; genocide memorials in Rwanda; and the Chernobyl exclusion zone in Ukraine, where tour companies send visitors to the ghost town left empty after the 1986 nuclear accident.¹¹ Ethics are a recurring concern: academics, tour operators, and residents question voyeurism, the commodification of death, and behavior in the age of the selfie, and one philosophical analysis identifies risks of voyeurism and of violating the privacy of victims and their relatives.¹¹^•¹⁴

The series itself has been drawn into this debate. A 2021 study in Tourism Management Perspectives used the show to propose a new categorization of dark attractions, noting that a significant proportion of the visits it depicts would not be available to the typical tourist.⁷ A writer researching Cambodian dark tourism argued that while Farrier enters no-go areas in the name of television, for many residents such conditions are everyday life.¹⁵ Media coverage has also measurably affected demand: the popular HBO series Chernobyl demonstrated a clear positive effect on tourism demand to related sites.¹⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Documentary, docudrama, and lifestyle series › Travel and expedition documentary series

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?